Shakespeare helps change our sense of human life and human
promise through an almost complete rejection of ideals. Like his
contemporary, Cervantes, Shakespeare has only contempt for the
heroic ideal. It is not only that his martial heroes— Titus, Hector,
Othello, Hotspur, Macbeth, and more— perish on the stage; heroic
warriors often perish on stage. But in Shakespeare, they and the
values they uphold become objects of deep skepticism and some-
times of contempt. Nor is Shakespeare terribly friendly to the reli-
gious ideal or the ideal of contemplation. His depiction of Hamlet
off ers an exception from his pervasive distrust of ideals, which is
part of what makes the play as fascinating (and anomalous) as it is.
But overall, Shakespeare is our great de- idealizing writer.
Shakespeare does not create a comprehensive turning away from
ideals in the West. Larger factors are involved. But Shakespeare
senses the impending anti- idealist turn, by and large endorses it, and
helps bring it to pass. Shakespeare, as Arnold Hauser argues, is a
poet of the dawning bourgeois age, who has little use for chivalry
and the culture of heroic honor. One might add that Shakespeare
does not seem terribly well disposed to the burgeoning culture of
wealth and comfort, the culture of Self that is on the horizon. His
ambivalence about the rising class is perceptible in The Merchant
of Venice, Twelfth Night, and a number of the other plays that fea-
ture the rising middle class and the aristocrats who have integrated
themselves into the new order.
The great shift from a feudal world to a modern one would
have taken place if William Shakespeare had never lived. But
Shakespeare does his part to urge the transition forward, much as
Cervantes does. And Shakespeare allows us to see some of the dy-
namics of the transition. We are now prone to believe that Shake-
speare had no palpable convictions. To use Keats’s famous term,
Shakespeare is to most of us the ultimate poet of negative capability.
He is capable of abiding in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts
The Triumph of Self 11